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| <nettime> Susan Sontag in N.Y.Times: 'A Just War' |
<http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990502mag-sontag.html>
[The Roving Reporter notes: "I usually reformat these
but in this case: "I found that essence rare..."]
Why Are We In Kosovo?
ENTERTAINMENT
Restaurants
It's complicated, but not that Movies
complicated. There is such a thing as Music
a just war. By SUSAN SONTAG Theater &
Dance
Bars &
[Image] h[Image] Nightlife
Not all violence is equally Art &
Museums
day a reprehensible, not all wars Books &
Talks
friend equally unjust: American Sports
from bombers headed for Yugoslavia Getaways
home, taking off from a NATO base in
New Italy. SHOPPING
York, Photograph by Sales
called Alberto Pizzoli/Sygma Events
me in -------- Coupons
Bari -- Yellow Pages
where I am living for a couple of
months -- to ask whether I am all CLASSIFIEDS
right and inquired in passing whether Real Estate
I can hear sounds of the bombing. I Autos
reassured her that not only could I Jobs
not hear the bombs dropping on
Belgrade and Novi Sad and Pristina COMMUNITY
from downtown Bari, but even the About
planes taking off from the nearby NATO Community
base of Gioia del Colle are quite Join a Group
inaudible. Though it is easy to mock Create a
Group
my geographyless American friend's Update a
Group
vision of European countries being
only slightly larger than postage LIFE
stamps, her Tiny Europe seems a nice Food
complement to the widely held vision Home
of Helpless Europe being dragged into Fashion &
a bellicose folly by Big Bad America. Style
Health &
Perhaps I exaggerate. I am writing Fitness
this from Italy -- weakest link in the How to New
NATO chain. Italy (unlike France and York
Germany) continues to maintain an
embassy in Belgrade. Milosevic has
NEIGHBORHOODS
received the Italian Communists' party Near My Home
leader, Armando Cossutta. The Near My Work
estimable mayor of Venice has sent an Other Areas
envoy to Belgrade with letters
addressed to Milosevic and to the
ethnic Albanian leader with whom he
has met, Ibrahim Rugova, proposing
Venice as a site for peace
negotiations. (The letters were
accepted, thank you very much, by the
Orthodox primate following the Easter
Sunday service.) But then it is
understandable that Italy has
panicked: Italians see not just scenes
of excruciating misery on their TV
news but images of masses on the move.
In Italy, Albanians are first of all
future immigrants.
---------------------- But opposition
Susan Sontag is the to the war is
author, most hardly confined
recently, of "The to Italy, and to
Volcano Lover: A one strand of
Romance." She is the political
completing a new spectrum. On the
novel. contrary:
---------------------- mobilized
against this war
are remnants of the left and the likes
of Le Pen and Bossi and Heider on the
right. The right is against
immigrants. The left is against
America. (Against the idea of America,
that is. The hegemony of American
popular culture in Europe could hardly
be more total.)
On both the so-called left and the
so-called right, identity-talk is on
the rise. The anti-Americanism that is
fueling the protest against the war
has been growing in recent years in
many of the nations of the New Europe,
and is perhaps best understood as a
displacement of the anxiety about this
New Europe, which everyone has been
told is a Good Thing and few dare
question. Nations are communities that
are always being imagined,
reconceived, reasserted, against the
pressure of a defining Other. The
specter of a nation without borders,
an infinitely porous nation, is bound
to create anxiety. Europe needs its
overbearing America.
Weak Europe? Impotent Europe? The
words are everywhere. The truth is
that the made-for-business Europe
being brought into existence with the
enthusiastic assent of the
"responsible" business and
professional elites is a Europe
precisely designed to be incapable of
responding to the threat posed by a
dictator like Milosevic. This is not a
question of "weakness," though that is
how it is being experienced. It is a
question of ideology.
It is not that ------------------
Europe is weak. Far Issue in Depth
from it. It is that Crisis in Kosovo
Europe, the Europe
under construction Forum
since the Final The Conflict in
Victory of Kosovo
Capitalism in 1989, ------------------
is up to something
else. Something which indeed renders
obsolete most of the questions of
justice -- indeed, all the moral
questions. (What prevails, in their
place, are questions of health, which
may be conjoined with ecological
concerns; but that is another matter.)
A Europe designed for spectacle,
consumerism and hand wringing ... but
haunted by the fear of national
identities being swamped either by
faceless multinational commercialism
or by tides of alien immigrants from
poor countries.
In one part of the continent, former
Communists play the nationalist card
and foment lethal nationalisms --
Milosevic being the most egregious
example. In the other part,
nationalism, and with it war, are
presumed to be superseded, outmoded.
How helpless "our" Europe feels in the
face of all this irrational slaughter
and suffering taking place in the
other Europe.
[Image] nd meanwhile the war goes on.
A war that started in 1991.
Not in 1999. And not, as the Serbs
would have it, six centuries ago,
either. Theirs is a country whose
nationalist myth has as its founding
event a defeat -- the Battle of
Kosovo, lost to the Turks in 1389. We
are fighting the Turks, Serb officers
commanding the mortar emplacements on
the heights of Sarajevo would assure
visiting journalists.
Would we not think it odd if France
still rallied around the memory of the
Battle of Agincourt -- 1415 -- in its
eternal enmity with Great Britain? But
who could imagine such a thing? For
France is Europe. And "they" are not.
Yes, [Image]
this is Not all violence is equally
Europe. reprehensible, not all wars
The equally unjust: American
Europe bombers headed for Yugoslavia
that taking off from a NATO base in
did not Italy.
respond Photograph by
to the Alberto Pizzoli/Sygma
Serb --------
shelling
of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege
of Sarajevo. The Europe that let
Bosnia die.
A new definition of Europe: the place
where tragedies don't take place.
Wars, genocides -- that happened here
once, but no longer. It's something
that happens in Africa. (Or places in
Europe that are not "really" Europe.
That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps
I exaggerate. But having spent a good
part of three years, from 1993 to
1996, in Sarajevo, it does not seem to
me like an exaggeration at all.
Living on the edge of NATO Europe,
only a few hundred kilometers from the
refugee camps in Durres and Kukes and
Blace, from the greatest mass of
suffering in Europe since the Second
World War, it is true that I can't
hear the NATO planes leaving the base
here in Puglia. But I can walk to
Bari's waterfront and watch Albanian
and Kosovar families pouring off the
daily ferries from Durres -- legal
immigrants, presumably -- or drive
south a hundred kilometers at night
and see the Italian coast guard
searching for the rubber dinghies
crammed with refugees that leave Vlore
nightly for the perilous Adriatic
crossing. But if I leave my apartment
in Bari only to visit friends and have
a pizza and see a movie and hang out
in a bar, I am no closer to the war
than the television news or the
newspapers that arrive every morning
at my doorstep. I could as well be
back in New York.
[Image] f course, it is easy to turn
your eyes from what is
happening if it is not happening to
you. Or if you have not put yourself
where it is happening. I remember in
Sarajevo in the summer of 1993 a
Bosnian friend telling me ruefully
that in 1991, when she saw on her TV
set the footage of Vukovar utterly
leveled by the Serbs, she thought to
herself, How terrible, but that's in
Croatia, that can never happen here in
Bosnia ... and switched the channel.
The following year, when the war
started in Bosnia, she learned
differently. Then she became part of a
story on television that other people
saw and said, How terrible ... and
switched the channel.
If several African How helpless "our"
states had cared pacified,
enough about the comfortable Europe
genocide of the feels in the face
Tutsis in Rwanda of all this
(a million irrational
people!) to slaughter and
intervene suffering taking
militarily, would place in the other
we have asked what Europe. But the
right they had images cannot be
when they had done conjured away --
nothing on behalf of refugees,
of the Kurds or people who have
the Tibetans? been pushed out of
their homes, their
torched villages,
by the hundreds of thousands and who
look like us.
Generations of Europeans fearful of
any idealism, incapable of indignation
except in the old anti-imperialist
cold-war grooves. (Yet, of course, the
key point about this war is that it is
the direct result of the end of the
cold war and the breakup of old
empires and imperial rivalries.) Stop
the War and Stop the Genocide, read
the banners being waved in the
demonstrations in Rome and here in
Bari. For Peace. Against War. Who is
not? But how can you stop those bent
on genocide without making war?
We have been here before. The horrors,
the horrors. Our attempt to forge a
"humanitarian" response. Our inability
(yes, after Auschwitz!) to comprehend
how such horrors can take place. And
as the horrors multiply, it becomes
even more incomprehensible why we
should respond to any one of them
(since we have not responded to the
others). Why this horror and not
another? Why Bosnia or Kosovo and not
Kurdistan or Rwanda or Tibet?
Are we not saying that European lives,
European suffering are more valuable,
more worth acting on to protect, than
the lives of people in the Middle
East, Africa and Asia?
One answer to this commonly voiced
objection to NATO's war is to say
boldly, Yes, to care about the fate of
the people in Kosovo is Eurocentric,
and what's wrong with that? But is not
the accusation of Eurocentrism itself
just one more vestige of European
presumption, the presumption of
Europe's universalist mission: that
every part of the globe has a claim on
Europe's attention?
If several African states had cared
enough about the genocide of the
Tutsis in Rwanda (nearly a million
people!) to intervene militarily, say,
under the leadership of Nelson
Mandela, would we have criticized this
initiative as being Afrocentric? Would
we have asked what right these states
have to intervene in Rwanda when they
have done nothing on behalf of the
Kurds or the Tibetans?
Another argument against intervening
in Kosovo is that the war is --
wonderful word -- illegal," because
NATO is violating the borders of a
sovereign state. Kosovo is, after all,
part of the new Greater Serbia called
Yugoslavia. Tough luck for the
Kosovars that Milosevic revoked their
autonomous status in 1989.
Inconvenient that 90 percent of
Kosovars are Albanians -- ethnic
Albanians" as they are called, to
distinguish them from the citizens of
Albania. Empires reconfigure. But are
national borders, which have been
altered so many times in the last
hundred years, really to be the
ultimate criterion? You can murder
your wife in your own house, but not
outdoors on the street.
Imagine that Nazi Germany had had no
expansionist ambitions but had simply
made it a policy in the late 1930's
and early 1940's to slaughter all the
German Jews. Do we think a government
has the right to do whatever it wants
on its own territory? Maybe the
governments of Europe would have said
that 60 years ago. But would we
approve now of their decision?
Push the supposition into the present.
What if the French Government began
slaughtering large numbers of
Corsicans and driving the rest out of
Corsica ... or the Italian Government
began emptying out Sicily or Sardinia,
creating a million refugees ... or
Spain decided to apply a final
solution to its rebellious Basque
population. Wouldn't we agree that a
consortium of powers on the continent
had the right to use military force to
make the French (or Italian, or
Spanish) Government reverse its
actions, which would probably mean
overthrowing that Government?
But of course this couldn't happen,
could it? Not in Europe. My friends in
Sarajevo used to say during the siege:
How can "the West" be letting this
happen to us? This is Europe, too.
We're Europeans. Surely "they" won't
allow it to go on.
But they -- Europe -- did.
For something truly terrible happened
in Bosnia. From the Serb death camps
in the north of Bosnia in 1992, the
first death camps on European soil
since the 1940's, to the mass
executions of many thousands of
civilians at Srebrenica and elsewhere
in the summer of 1995 -- Europe
tolerated that.
So, obviously, Bosnia wasn't Europe.
Those of us who spent time in Sarajevo
used to say that, as the 20th century
began at Sarajevo, so will the 21st
century begin at Sarajevo. If the
options before NATO all seem either
improbable or unpalatable, it is
because NATO's actions come eight
years too late. Milosevic should have
been stopped when he was shelling
Dubrovnik in 1991.
Back in 1993 and 1994, American policy
makers were saying that even if there
were no United States intervention in
Bosnia, rest assured, this would be
the last thing that Milosevic would be
allowed to get away with. A line in
the sand had been drawn: he would
never be allowed to make war on
Kosovo. But who believed the Americans
then? Not the Bosnians. Not Milosevic.
Not the Europeans. Not even the
Americans themselves. After Dayton,
after the destruction of independent
Bosnia, it was time to go back to
sleep, as if the series of events set
in motion in 1989 with the accession
to power of Milosevic and the
revocation of autonomous status for
the province of Kosovo, would not play
out to its obvious logical end.
[Image] f Europe is having a hard time
thinking that it matters what
happens in the southeastern corner of
Europe, imagine how hard it is for
Americans to think it is in their
interest. It is not in America's
interest to push this war on Europe.
It is very much not in Europe's
interest to reward Milosevic for the
destruction of Yugoslavia and the
creation of so much human suffering.
Why not just let the brush fire burn
out? is the argument of some. And the
expulsion of a million or more
refugees into the neighboring
countries of Albania and Macedonia?
This will certainly bring on the
destruction of the fragile new state
of Macedonia and the redrawing of the
map of the Balkans -- certain to be
disputed by, at the very least,
Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. Do we
imagine this will happen peacefully?
Not surprisingly, the Serbs are
presenting themselves as the victims.
(Clinton equals Hitler, etc.) But it
is grotesque to equate the casualties
inflicted by the NATO bombing with the
mayhem inflicted on hundreds of
thousands of people in the last eight
years by the Serb programs of ethnic
cleansing.
Not all violence is equally
reprehensible; not all wars are
equally unjust.
No forceful response to the violence
of a state against peoples who are
nominally its own citizens? (Which is
what most "wars" are today. Not wars
between states.) The principal
instances of mass violence in the
world today are those committed by
governments within their own legally
recognized borders. Can we really say
there is no response to this? Is it
acceptable that such slaughters be
dismissed as civil wars, also known as
"age-old ethnic hatreds." (After all,
anti-Semitism was an old tradition in
Europe; indeed, a good deal older than
ancient Balkan hatreds. Would this
have justified letting Hitler kill all
the Jews on German territory?) Is it
true that war never solved anything?
(Ask a black American if he or she
thinks our Civil War didn't solve
anything.)
[Image] ar is not simply a mistake, a
failure to communicate. There
is radical evil in the world, which is
why there are just wars. And this is a
just war. Even if it has been bungled.
Stop the genocide. Return all refugees
to their homes. Worthy goals. But how
is any of this conceivably going to
happen unless the Milosevic regime is
overthrown? (And the truth is, it's
not going to happen.)
Impossible to see how this war will
play out. All the options seem
improbable, as well as undesirable.
Unthinkable to keep bombing
indefinitely, if Milosevic is indeed
willing to accept the destruction of
the Serbian economy; unthinkable for
NATO to stop bombing, if Milosevic
remains intransigent.
The Milosevic Government has finally
brought on Serbia a small portion of
the suffering it has inflicted on
neighboring peoples.
War is a culture, bellicosity is
addictive, defeat for a community that
imagines itself to be history's
eternal victim can be as intoxicating
as victory. How long will it take for
the Serbs to realize that the
Milosevic years have been an
unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the
net result of Milosevic's policies
being the economic and cultural ruin
of the entire region, including
Serbia, for several generations? Alas,
one thing we can be sure of, that will
not happen soon.
Table of Contents
May 02, 1999
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
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